As a multimedia system is developed, a user of the multimedia system may share multimedia in or out of the home. A home network service provided in the home makes great advances after a public consultative group for performing commercialization of a home network, called Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) is started. Accordingly, the user may share contents between different brands and products, through a wired or wireless home network, among home appliances, PCs, and wireless devices. Also, multimedia sharing may be performed through a separate external server connected with a home network when providing contents to an external device.
With advances in multimedia systems, efficient management of various contents which are separately stored in several devices has come to the fore as an important issue. The user may typically use metadata information to search a device which stores contents that the user wants to download and systematically store.
However, when the user uses metadata information stored in a server, there are problems in that it takes a long time to perform an initial setup, an overhead is generated to read the metadata information of the server, and a protocol suitable for a terminal of the user and the server must be defined.